Knowledge graphs are useful and flexible knowledge representation structures that can facilitate the integration of information in NLP tasks. They are however incomplete, and not only that, but also skewed in the type of knowledge they include. In this talk I will present an investigation into two existing knowledge graphs – Freebase15k and WordNet18 – and show how particular characteristics influence the quality of knowledge graph embeddings, which ultimately impact knowledge graph completion and other tasks. I will also talk about knowledge discovery in knowledge graphs – as paths associated with direct relations – and how these patterns can be used for both “internal” knowledge graph completion and targeted information extraction from external textual sources.

In this talk, I will show how bilingual adults spontaneously access native translations of second language words unconsciously and unknowingly stop accessing these representations when second language words are unpleasant. Even more surprising, bilinguals unconsciously access the sound of words in their native language while speaking in their second. More surprising still, cross-language effects extend to the domain of syntax: Welsh-English bilinguals spontaneously transfer to English a morpho-phonological transformation rule of Welsh that is entirely alien to their native language! And perhaps worryingly, bilinguals engaging in a gambling task for money take more risk when receiving verbal feedback in their native as compared to their second language. Taken together these findings reveal unsuspected levels of automaticity and cognitive diversity linked to language variations within and between individuals. This realization calls for a reconsideration of the way in which we conceptualise free will and operations classically regarded as volitional.

Internalist semantics and the grammatical construction of individuals.

Short abstract:

Our use of language presupposes a domain of entities, but this domain is at least in part a result of a conceptualization encoded in language. How to analyze linguistic conceptualization without falling into a simplistic Sapir-Whorf relativism? I address this challenge by distinguishing a basic domain of abstract entities, each named by a noun, from the domain of discourse referents, denoted by DPs. In between, grammar provides a template organizing part-structural information in different ways across languages. This explains a cluster of phenomena relative to kind-interpretation, number, and countability, unifies the analysis of nouns with that of names, and makes possible a predictive theory of possible nouns in natural language. In this way, lexical semantics can be integrated with a “grounded” approach to cognition, as the form for representing the substance provided by the mental recreation of experience.

Full abstract:

Most people would agree that language expresses a conceptualization of reality. But going beyond this vague statement is made difficult by a tendency to frame it in terms of unsatisfactory alternatives: that the entities and their properties are just “out there”, or that they are “created” by language. My goal is to outline an approach to the role of language in the conceptualization of entities that rests on a falsifiable empirical basis and does not fall into a simplistic and unpredictive Sapir-Whorf relativism.

At the most basic level an entity is an abstract object without internal structure, semantically modelled as a kind. Water, river, event, time, but also Socrates or Hamlet all name, at this level, mind-internal abstract objects, whether or not we may associate properties to them. All nouns are names in this basic ontology, and different labels identify different abstract objects. On the other hand, the discourse referents that speakers talk about are denoted by complete DPs, and do not necessarily require a noun to be spoken about (look at that). We make identifying reference acts to such referents by means of DPs, and we identify entities and their types by means of nominalized roots (or ‘nouns’): the two are sharply distinct. In between, grammar provides a structural template which encodes information about part structure, organized in various ways across languages. This explains in a novel and unified fashion a cluster of phenomena relative to the interplay of morphology and lexical semantics: the correspondence between a particular interpretation and a particular morphology in furniture­-type mass nouns, and restrictions on the kind reading for plurals including mass plurals like waters and beginnings.

Another important consequence of this approach is that it unifies the analysis of nouns and names: at the basic level, all entity labels are names, and the difference arises with the syntactic construction of a DP. This explains the parallel structure of this is called John and this is calledwater, but also a range of non-canonical uses of names, including the mass reading of too much Falstaff. Finally, the hypothesized interpretive template makes it possible to contemplate a predictive theory of possible nouns in any natural language: any entity can be thought, but language constrains what can be encapsulated as a noun; for instance not world-particular objects, or properties like roundsquare.

Finally, any theory of linguistic conceptualization should be compatible with what is known about the psychological representation of concepts. I will argue that viewing linguistic conceptualization as an interpretive template makes it easier to integrate lexical semantics with a “grounded” approach to cognition as the mental recreation of experience. In this way, linguistic theorizing on the content of nouns does not set up psychologically unsupported models of lexical concepts, but identifies the framework for representing through words what we know about entities.

There is a class of Ns that are grammatically count such as fence, wall, twig, that are non-quantized like bona fide singular count Ns (cat) but also not cumulative like mass Ns (mud, water). Furthermore, puzzlingly, many of these Ns are felicitous in pseudo-partitive, measure NPs: Thick woolen drapes of red and gold covered every inch of wall (COCA). We address this puzzle, which, to our knowledge, has so far not been noticed in contemporary mass/count debates in formal semantics. We argue that fence-like nouns admit of multiple individuation schemas which leads to overlap with respect to what counts as one in their denotations. As a result: (i) fence, like cat, but unlike mud is quantized at specific counting contexts (and so is grammatically count), (ii) fence, like mud, but unlike cat is non-quantized at the null counting context which make them felicitous in measure NPs.